Do you believe?

The latest headline in the food world is an outbreak of salmonella, apparently traceable to peanut butter. Having had salmonellosis before (from a delicious flan in a Mexican restaurant), I can vouch that it’s terribly unpleasant. But I’m scratching my head. Salmonella is usually associated with eggs, which commonly harbor the bacteria, that haven’t been exposed to heat high enough to kill off the pathogen. That’s the reason you can’t get a soft-boiled egg in a greasy spoon anymore and fresh mayonnaise is off the menu in fine restaurants. It seems odd that a product that essentially contains one ingredient—peanuts—could be tainted.

A glance at Peter’s ingredients list tells me it contains roasted peanuts, sugar, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (cottonseed and rapeseed) and salt. Hydrogenated oils are probably the most highly processed item on the list, made by adding hydrogen to liquid oils to make them solid. (At least that’s the common description; I can grasp making oil, but have no idea how you add a molecule of anything to a food.) Sugar is also highly processed, but neither of these ingredients are terribly prone to salmonella, which tends to prefer animal products. So, maybe it’s not the ingredients at all.

The product in question bears the label Peter Pan (of do you believe in peanut butter? fame), also sold under the name Great Value, and is manufactured by food giant ConAgra Foods—they apparently make all Peter Pan, but not all Great Value peanut butter. The affected jars all came from a single facility in Sylvester, Georgia (in “The Peanut Capital of the World”), The problem is national, affecting 228 people in 39 states, including states as far away as Alaska and Maine. It’s a fine example of how tangled the food supply web becomes at the food-as-a-commodity level.

My guess is that the FDA, now on site in Sylvester, will find bacteria at the plant: not associated with a type of food, but with the process as a whole. It’s unlikely that human hands touched any of the foodstuffs along the way, since harvesting and process are so completely automated. It may be something as simple as bird droppings contaminating part of a rapeseed field, entering the processing plant, which in turns distributes the bacteria among several thousands of jars destined for widespread distribution. The bacteria then propagate in jars of unrefrigerated peanut butter on stores’ and consumers’ shelves.

It is equally likely that results will be announced as inconclusive: between the time delays (the outbreak began in August of last year), and the political clout of large conglomerates, so vital to local economies in the South and elsewhere, the FDA will not be in a position to make any irrefutable statements, and the status quo will remain.